Even in a country that has grown numb to the horror of school massacres, Monday’s shooting death of a student and a teacher at a private Christian school in Wisconsin was shocking.
Surprisingly, Natalie Rupnow, the culprit who allegedly committed suicide during the outburst, was a girl and only 15 years old. The number of mass shootings committed by women is quite low.
Only 4.3% of the 441 mass shootings that occurred in the US between 1966 and 2022 were committed by women, according to statistics from the think tank Rockefeller Institute of Government.
There have only been four since 1982, and two of those cases included women acting in tandem with a man, according to an open-source database kept up to date by Mother Jones.
Jennifer Sanmarco, a 44-year-old postal worker, killed seven people and then herself at a Santa Barbara postal facility in 2006 after feeling that she was the victim of a plot. After a normal background check, she was allowed to purchase a 9 mm Smith & Wesson handgun without any issues, despite having a lengthy history of mental illness and having been placed on retirement disability leave for psychological reasons in 2003.
In 2014, Cherie Lash Rhoades, a 44-year-old former tribal chairwoman, opened fire at the Cedarville Rancheria Tribal Office in the isolated hamlet of Alturas, Northern California, killing four people and seriously injuring two more. Her scheduled eviction from a property on tribal lands was the subject of the shooting during a hearing.
Among the deceased were Rurik Davies, Rhoades’ 50-year-old brother; Glenn Calonicco, his 30-year-old nephew; and Angel Penn, her 19-year-old niece, who was shot while cradling her newborn child. A court heard that the baby was unhurt.
Rhoades, one of the fewer than 50 women on death row, was given a death sentence in 2017.
Before taking her own life in 2018, 26-year-old Sochia Moseley, a Rite Aid distribution center employee in Aberdeen, Maryland, killed three people and injured three more. Despite her history of mental illness, she was lawfully the owner of a 9 millimeter handgun.
Last year, 28-year-old Audrey Hale carried out another massacre at a Christian school in Nashville, killing six people, including three children, before being shot and killed by responding police. Hale used the pronouns he/him and identified as transgender, according to police later.
The 38-year-old San Diego native Nasim Aghdam opened fire on YouTube’s San Bruno, California, headquarters in 2018.
Before killing herself, the American-Iranian badly harmed three others.
She became upset with the video platform for policies that she felt were an attempt to discriminate against her, limit the number of views on her animal rights films, and prevent her from making money from them, according to her perplexed relatives.
According to the authorities, she lawfully purchased the Smith & Wesson 9 mm semiautomatic weapon.
A profoundly masculine act
Women’s rights advocates claim that statistics indicating that women make up the majority of victims are inexorably tied to the disproportionate portrayal of men as the shooters in violent shootings.
Many victims of violent and fatal crimes in the United States are women, and they are associated with a broader pattern of domestic violence and ideological misogyny, according to a 2019 study published in the California Law Review, which referred to mass shootings as a profoundly masculine act.
According to the report, women and children bear the brunt of the consequences, even in cases where neighbors, strangers, and law enforcement are involved in mass shootings.
According to research from the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, women and children made up 64% of the casualties in 57% of mass shootings that involved an intimate partner or other family member.
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